Resort 2

Le livre

For two years British photographer Anna Fox documented holiday culture at the iconic Butlins resort in the seaside town of Bognor Regis, West-Sussex. This new book Resort 2 is the second part of the Resort project. Resort 1, published in the Fall of 2013, looked at Family Breaks at this iconic holiday camp, providing a unique insight into contemporary British leisure culture. Resort 2 observes a very different kind of holiday, the themed adult breaks, taking place about once every six weeks inside this very British holiday camp. Butlins, famed for its family holidays since its creation in the mid-1930s, needed to rework its branding from the 1970s onwards. Cheap package holidays started to draw families away from this popular resort and several of the camps closed down.Having attracted tens of millions of holidaymakers since its creation in 1936, the popularity of Butlins was at stake and after the rebranding of the Family Breaks came a new invention - the Adult only Themed Weekends. Steeped in a carnival atmosphere these raucous weekends bring out a range of fantastic characters from groups of imitation pop icons such as Amy Winehouse and Elvis to gangs of male fairies. With various titles such as Back to the 60s or 90s Re-loaded and the marvellous Hot Summer Party, these weekends attract thousands of work-worn adults ready to try out exotic fancy dress and party hard for two days and three nights.Shot using both medium and large-format, Foxs deeply saturated colour photographs provide a fascinating insight into an unseen side of holiday camp culture.Resort 2 includes 40 photographs from the series, with an essay by David Chandler.Foxs Butlins photographs often blur the lines between the staged and the carefully observed, between the orchestrated and the documentary. Fox is, at heart, an observer; and Resort 1 is a sustained observation that, on closer inspection, reveals the bizarre interiority of the Butlins experience. The GuardianIf in Resort 1, adult (...)